Papi

by David Ortiz

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Desert

  Tom Kelly and Me

  Crossroads

  Work, Wait, Play

  Turning Point

  The New Red Sox

  The October of Ortiz

  Photos 1

  Parade Route and Out

  Life After the Series

  In and Out Red Sox

  Coasting

  Another Country

  Accused

  Photos 2

  Written Off

  Paper Tigers

  Breaks and Rebellions

  This Is Our F’in City

  Ups, Downs, Silver Linings

  The End and a New Beginning

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix

  Index

  About the Authors

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by David Ortiz

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-81461-5

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover photographs © Michael Ivins/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images

  eISBN 978-0-544-81454-7

  v1.0417

  To Red Sox fans, my second family. Playing for and winning with you is one of the biggest thrills of my life.

  —David Ortiz

  For my lifelong advocates, Michelle and Aryl. I’m proud to be your brother.

  —Michael Holley

  Introduction

  For many reasons, the statistics say that I shouldn’t be here.

  I think about that all the time, even when I’m lounging on a beach with a nice drink in my hand. The thoughts carry me away, and I alternate between daydreams and remembrances of things that I was spared from. This was a time long before I was celebrated for baseball milestones and home runs in the bottom of the 9th, 10th, or even 12th inning. It was many years before I cursed terrorists and spoke up for freedom without fear. It was before I split my days between trying to win games for the Boston Red Sox and trying to save my sinking marriage, for the sake of my family. Yes, it was even before I became known by a nickname, Big Papi, that resonates throughout Boston, Santo Domingo, and anywhere in the baseball world.

  The statistics then had nothing to do with my output as a designated hitter. No one, outside of my family, would have guessed that I would one day redefine the position and accumulate more home runs, hits, runs scored, and runs batted in than any DH in history. But to get there, celebrated and cheered by millions, I had to survive a neighborhood that didn’t attract adoring crowds and the bright lights of television.

  I grew up in Haina in the Dominican Republic. The city itself was recently cited as one of the most polluted places in the world. There was a battery recycling plant headquartered there, and as a result, battery acid and lead would seep into the soil. Piles of batteries, some as high as three-story buildings, could be found in the city. That alone put lives in danger. Then there was my neighborhood, which I made it out of by grace. My parents, Enrique and Angela, were strict on my younger sister, Albania, and me. They had to be. Our lives depended on it. We were poor, and our neighborhood was teeming with violence and crime. Shootings. Stabbings. Drugs. Gangs.

  The statistics say I shouldn’t be here.

  My parents tried everything they could to protect us from our surroundings while we lived there, all the while hustling to make enough money so we could get out. Our house was small, with the main rooms divided by walls no thicker than plywood. That small house was large enough to have patches of land in the front and back, our yards, and the backyard was the only place where Albania and I could play in the neighborhood. The fear, from my mom and dad, was that we’d get caught in some crossfire that had nothing to do with us.

  There are a few things from growing up that stay with me now, seared into my memories forever. I remember my parents sitting Albania and me down and showing us a bag. It had what appeared to be a white, powdery substance in it. I can still remember the stern looks on their faces, their eyes making contact with ours and locking there for the entire, brief warning.

  “You will probably see this. Someone might ask you to take this. Don’t do it.”

  The bag contained a type of cocaine that had been circulating through the neighborhood. My parents were concerned enough to physically show it to us so we would know exactly what to avoid. They also firmly delivered a message that I still share with young people today: drugs can be around you, and someone can offer you drugs . . . but there is nothing that says you have to take them. Nothing. Ultimately, you control the situation.

  Some things were beyond controlling, beyond the shield and shelter of my parents. Once, my mother sent me to the bodega to pick up some groceries. On my way there, I saw a guy murdered. Right in front of my eyes, killed. I saw things that no one should see, especially a kid.

  I saw it, yet never became it, thanks to God and my parents. To this day, I’m a ghetto boy who made it out, but where I came from still is in me. I don’t let people see it, especially in the corporate circles I’m in now. Yet I never forget. If I ever do, that’ll be the day that I lose my humility, so I’m glad to remember.

  I’m glad that my three children have never had to live under the physical and financial pressures that I did as a kid. But in retrospect, my upbringing equipped me for every success and challenge I’ve ever had in baseball. Every single one. Watching my parents in that environment taught me about discipline, hard work, and being a provider, even amid the worst circumstances. I’d always laugh inside when I heard people talk about producing in the clutch in baseball. Please. That was nothing. I can tell you that I never felt pressure, not one time, strolling to the plate in a baseball game. I knew I wasn’t going to get shot playing baseball. I knew that something I did could lead to a celebration, and I like to celebrate.

  As adventurous as my life in baseball was over the course of twenty years, it was still a life in baseball. There were rules in place. Guidelines. In baseball, there were certain things that always could happen, or never could happen. My life, my real life, wasn’t like that. And that unpredictability led to several life-changing events.

  On the first day of 2002, I received news so devastating that I thought my heart would never fully recover. And I’m still not sure that it has. I learned how much sports can hurt people in 2003 and, in 2004, how they can help heal people too. I saw the goodness and beauty of an entire organization, singing together, in 2007. I had my character, my very essence, questioned and mocked in 2009. The next year I was urged to give up baseball and go home. Three years later, in 2013, I was the MVP of the World Series. In 2016, in the final regular-season game of my career, I looked to heaven for the spirit of my mother. My father was standing by my side. The president of the Dominican Republic was there. And on the field, cameras roamed and flashed, prepared to share my story with millions of people.

  But that was just a small part of it. It all began in Haina, fighting against violence in the air and on the ground. That’s where I, Enrique and Angela’s son, learned to survive. They taught me how to work. The journey that followed taught me how to persevere and yet be transformed.

  I find it amazing, and ironic, that a life beyond anything I’ve ever imagined has been made possible by playing baseball. I say that because baseball isn’t even the sport I wanted to play.

  Who d
idn’t want to be like Mike in the late 1980s and early 1990s? I was a kid, and I played and thought about basketball constantly. My friends and I would go neighborhood to neighborhood, trying to find basketball games. I remember playing a tournament in Santa Rosa, about a 90-minute drive from my home in Haina. We knew all the NBA stars: Michael Jordan, Karl Malone, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird. I was big for my age, six feet tall when I was 10 and six-four at 14, and I was a power forward. Man, I was athletic, and I could run and jump. I thought it was the most beautiful game, exciting and entertaining, and that’s what I wanted to do.

  My father Enrique always had different plans. He was happy that I was interested in sports at all, since that made it less likely I’d be drawn into the chaotic environment of our neighborhood—people caught up in gangs, shootings and murders, people lost to drugs, in a big way. My country, unfortunately, became known as a Caribbean bridge for drug trafficking between the United States, South America, and Europe. There were billions of dollars in international drug transactions, which led to some dark, depressing, and corrupt tales in the Dominican. It had a devastating effect on the culture then, and it’s still a huge problem now.

  It was bad in my neighborhood, but things got a little rougher, emotionally, when my mother and father began to have a hard time in their relationship. My parents were already in the process of building a house together in Haina, in a community safer than the one we were in. But my folks were arguing a lot as the new house was being built, so they briefly separated before it was finished. My mother’s sister had a big house, and we moved in with her for a while. My father wasn’t officially living there, but he was so attentive that I don’t ever remember feeling his absence. Once, he became angry when he heard that some people at my aunt’s place looked at me, decided that I wasn’t busy enough, and suggested it was time for me to go to work like every other adult in the house and start earning some money.

  I was thirteen.

  There was no way my father was going to let that happen. He wanted me to go to school, he wanted me to live with his sister . . . and he wanted me to play baseball. He played some ball in his day, as a pitcher, and whenever I talked to him about my love of basketball, he talked to me about the beauty of baseball. He insisted that I was going to be in the big leagues, and he’d always point out that my hand-eye coordination was exceptional. He was passionate about baseball, and now I understand that he wanted to see my excitement level for the game match my gift for it. I was tall and athletic, and my swing was whip-quick.

  My father always bragged about me, how I had the size and strength to play in the big leagues one day. He was talking about me to a friend of his one day, and the friend asked me what position I liked to play. I told him first base. “Oh,” I remember him saying. “It’s going to be tough to make it there.” I can understand now why he reacted that way. A lot of the best position players who made it from the Dominican to the majors were middle infielders and outfielders. You didn’t see a lot of kids like me saying they were going to play first in the big leagues.

  In every way possible, my father was always finding a way to encourage my appetite for baseball. He had a friend in the restaurant business who often traveled to New York City. My dad’s friend used to go to a place in the city where Yankees first baseman Don Mattingly would have dinner. He approached Mattingly once and said, “I’ve got a friend in the Dominican. If you could sign something for him, he would die! Anything you can do.” Mattingly surprised us all with something that became my trophy at home: he signed a bat, one he’d apparently gone 2-for-4 with. I’ve never told Mattingly that I was the kid he gave that bat to. But his generosity taught me a lesson. You never know how much inspiration you can give someone with a small gesture.

  I can still remember the exact moment when I really fell for the game. I was about a month away from my 16th birthday, in the fall of 1991, and my father wanted me to watch the World Series with him. It was the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves, and five of the seven games were decided by one run. Before that Series, honestly, watching baseball had been a little boring for me. When you watch the game now on TV, the camera angles and close-ups make you feel like you’re actually at the game. It wasn’t like that when I was growing up. But that Series changed everything. I couldn’t take my eyes off of Kirby Puckett. He probably became my favorite player based on what he did in Game 6. With his team trailing three games to two, he was all over the field. I had never seen anything like it. He tripled in the first inning, climbed a 13-foot wall in the third to take away an extra-base hit, had a sacrifice fly in the fifth, singled in the eighth, and homered in the eleventh to win it and force Game 7.

  Even after watching all of that, I can’t truthfully say that I imagined myself winning late-night playoff games like Puckett did. “We’ll see you tomorrow night,” broadcaster Jack Buck said after the Puckett home run. Years later, Buck’s son, Joe, would use a similar line when talking about me. My father may have envisioned all those things, but I didn’t. It never crossed my mind that one day I’d dress in the same clubhouse, try to connect with the same fans in the Twin Cities, and play for the same manager as Hall of Famer Puckett (although I’m sure Kirby had a much better relationship with manager Tom Kelly than I did).

  At 16, I was still too far away from the majors to have major league dreams. My father and a handful of local scouts said I was destined for the big leagues, but I wasn’t sure of the path I was going to take. Because I was a first baseman with a rising swing, some people started calling me “the next Fred McGriff.” The only thing I had in common with Fred McGriff at the time was that we were both tall lefties. He was in the middle of an impactful stretch of six consecutive 30–home run seasons. It was an honor to be in the same sentence as someone like him.

  The Florida Marlins were on the verge of being an expansion team, and like everyone else in the majors, they were scouring the Dominican for talent. I was at their facility daily, and I seemed to be their only first baseman. I got a lot of work there, maybe too much work—I developed painful inflammation in my elbow. The Marlins sensed that I couldn’t help them much, and they essentially kicked me out of camp and told me they might give me a look when I felt better.

  I was heartbroken. Everything I had seen and done in baseball up to that point had been positive. I can’t say that I’d ever had anything close to a setback before being cut by the Marlins. I was skilled and strong, and there wasn’t any reason to think I couldn’t do something. But then there was the pain of being cut.

  The year before that, I had been casually hanging around the Mets’ facility. I was facing pitchers much older than me, and I remember one of them throwing a fastball in the high 90s. I was young and raw, and the pitcher wasn’t trying to fool me. He just wanted to prove to me that his unhittable fastball could handcuff me and any other 15-year-old who wanted to step into the box against him. But I kept spoiling his pitches. It was foul ball, foul ball, foul ball, over and over. The at-bat ended with me lining out to right field, but that performance would cause a buzz on the island. By the time I was in the Marlins’ program, I was convinced they were going to sign me when I turned 17. Being sent home like that truly made me sick to my stomach.

  My father saw me walk dejectedly into the house, and he noticed that I wasn’t touching any food. I can still remember his words. “Son, what happened? Are you injured? Did you break a bone?” I told him what had happened, and it was the strangest thing—he let out a huge laugh. I said, “Dad, did you hear what I said? The Marlins let me go today.” And he said, “I heard you. I’m laughing because they let go of a big league player today.”

  It’s funny. The Marlins had just hired a new general manager to make the team competitive fast, and his name meant nothing to me at that time. Many years later, he’d become one of the few GMs who would seek my opinion on players and team-building. His name was Dave Dombrowski.

  As I talked with my father, I mentioned that a man named Hector Alvarez h
ad given me his business card as I was leaving Marlins camp. Alvarez was known as a buscon—someone who finds young baseball players and brings them to the attention of big league teams. The buscones have an important role, both for young players like I was and for major league teams. They are constantly mining for athletic gold on the island, and understandably so. In recent baseball seasons, as many as 10 percent of major leaguers have come from the Dominican. So the talent is there, and the way the scouting system is set up, you could sign a dozen Dominican prospects and that would still be cheaper than signing a third- or fourth-round draft pick born in the United States.

  Alvarez said he would train me, and the most important drill of his training program was common sense. That meant we did nothing, absolutely nothing, with my elbow. I rested it as I worked on other aspects of conditioning. I felt great, physically and spiritually. The dream that my parents had for me was still alive. The two of them couldn’t have been better examples of how to carry on when a relationship goes south and there are kids involved. They couldn’t figure out a way to be together anymore, but they never took that out on me and Albania. Looking back on it now, I have no idea how I did it, but I managed to stay in the middle. They were just Mom and Dad to me, and I loved them both. They showed me how to work too.

  My mother was always taking on jobs to pick up extra money. She would sometimes travel to other parts of the Caribbean, as far away as Curaçao and St. Thomas, to buy clothes and sell them to tourists at local hotels. My father worked with all aspects of cars, from parts to repairs to sales. They worked hard so I could go to what is known as a collegio, as opposed to escuela. In the United States, that’s the difference between a private school and a public school. The collegio was much better than the escuela, and a lot of my middle-class classmates there had no idea how far beneath them I was economically.